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World of Warcraft's New Achievements

Want to be an overachiever? We dig inside the new World of Warcraft achievements system released along Wrath of the Lich King.

It could be argued that the biggest impact the Xbox 360 has had on videogames to date hasn't been any single game or technical advancement, but the Xbox Live achievements system built into every game released on the platform. The idea of special or hidden objectives for a game is hardly new, but tying them into a global account score has created an overwhelmingly popular addiction for many Xbox 360 gamers.

While a few games have fiddled with smaller-scale achievement systems of their own (such as Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4), they often feel small in comparison and not as compelling. That's definitely not the case with the new achievements system recently introduced in World of Warcraft alongside the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In many ways, it improves on the concept we've come to expect on the 360, adding a wealth of stats and other features that are great to fiddle through even if you never pick up a single achievement.

The main achievements screen is bound by default to the "Y" key, and brings up a list of categories, and overall score and recent achievements. Here's the main screen for the Death Knight I started last week -- as you can see, there are categories for everything from quests and dungeons to professions and PvP:

Probably the easiest achievements to get will be in the Exploration category, especially if you have level 70 characters. All that's required is exploring an entire zone, and you'll get the achievement for it. What's cool is that if you don't have the achievement for a zone, you can expand the listing to see a list of areas that you have or have not unlocked:

While most of the achievements are worth 10 points, there are some bigger achievements you can get for completing an entire category. For instance, in the Exploration category, I received 25-point achievements for fully exploring all of both the Eastern Kingdoms and Outland:

Another cool aspect of the achievements system can be found in the Quests category. As with Exploration, achievements are mostly broken down by zone, rewarding you for completing a set number of quests (usually every quest in the zone, minus one or two). Here, if you click on a zone, you can see exactly how many quests you've completed so far, which is pretty useful info as you're questing through a new area:

Quest achievements are broken down by "Classic" "The Burning Crusade" and "Wrath of the Lich King." The "Classic" quests aren't listed by zone, but simply require a set number of quests completed in either the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. "The Burning Crusade" category offers achievements for each zone, and then "Wrath of the Lich King" offers achievements not just for each zone, but for completing special quest chains or dailies. In other words, there's far more to be gained focusing on newer content than going back to Kalimdor for 10 points.